UCLA In the News January 16, 2019

Dr. Christopher Giza, director of UCLA’s Steve Tisch Brain Sports program, explains that most concussion treatments “are focused on the first four weeks after the injury: monitoring symptoms, avoiding reinjury, engaging in a modest level of activity, and just letting time pass. That kind of management doesn’t tend to work when you are outside that four-week gap…. I often refer to concussion and traumatic brain injury as the most complex injury to the most complex organ. To think that there’s a little checklist or formula that’s going to work for everybody — it doesn’t do justice to how complicated and individualized this injury can be.”

Dr. Gary Schiller, a professor of hematology-oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and researcher at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, described the need [for blood donations]. “Red blood cells from donors when you don’t make red cells carry oxygen and platelets from donors when you donate platelets to prevent you from having life-threatening hemorrhage,” he said. (Also: KNBC-TV, KCAL-TV)

It’s all so incredibly on-brand for UCLA, an nth-degree encapsulation of the Bruins’ mastermind of choreography, attitude and branding: head coach and former classical dancer Valorie Kondos Field, known to all by her ballet-mistress name Miss Val…. It is only fitting that in her final season — Miss Val announced her impending retirement this past September — every exercise in the UCLA catalog is Val to the max. (In Ohashi’s case, it’s Val to the power of Val, on a triple espresso.)

In basketball, players run, jump, and cut quickly, putting tremendous pressure on certain parts of the foot and the shoe as they change direction. A shoe that really does hold the foot more securely in place could potentially offer an advantage. The late John Wooden, who coached the basketball team at University of California-Los Angeles to 10 championships in 12 years in the 1960s and 1970s, would even start with new players by teaching them how to properly put on their socks and tie their shoelaces. It would help them to avoid blisters and other injuries, and he believed those small details were the foundation of great play.

In 2009, researchers at UCLA found that mothers who described their homes as “cluttered” had a stress hormone profile indicative of chronic stress. These moms also tended to have a more depressed mood throughout the day, were more tired in the evenings and had a difficult transition from work to home.

(Commentary written by UCLA’s Kim Elsesser) As it stands now, the Gillette ad sends a similar mixed message. The message is that aggressive behavior is wrong, and yet many men still partake in this behavior. These two messages may work against each other, and viewers are left subconsciously questioning whether they want to behave correctly or like most other men.

UCLA students Megan Hullander and Angela Simmons have now taken inspiration from that record to co-found Dude Ranch Dressing, which is set to launch following a release party on Thursday (January 17) with their first product, a vegan ranch dressing. “We tried to make it as Earth-friendly as possible and as healthy as we possibly could, and get all the ingredients while still maintaining the taste,” Hullander told the Daily Bruin. “We started out making recipes that we found, and then just replaced ingredients to use ones that were either more sustainable, or added things we thought would be good for flavor.”

Charter teachers joining the strike is a big deal because it shows they “see themselves in solidarity with the broader body of district educators,” said John Rogers, a professor of education at University of California, Los Angeles.

Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at UCLA, wrote a balanced op-ed last weekend in which he said that our demands were “important and legitimate,” that the district must invest in its schools, and that there was indeed a $1.8-billion reserve. He also said that without new money, the district would eventually face insolvency and suggested the district investigate a parcel tax, along with additional state funding.

That’s what professors Yalda T. Uhls and Patricia Greenfield at UCLA heard most often in the studies they did starting in 2007. When they talked to kids in fourth through sixth grade, 40 percent of the students chose fame as the top value from a list of personal goals that included a sense of community, financial success, benevolence and achievement.

A couple of decades after Mexico’s 1910 revolution, President Lazaro Cardenas spearheaded efforts to change this worldview, but his administration’s efforts were highly flawed. “Their approach to indigenous people was this deep romanticizing,” says Marjorie Becker, a historian and scholar of Mexico at UCLA. “They believed the indigenous were natural artists who sang and danced — of course, that was racist, too.”

“For general overweight people, I don’t know anything that is predictive of that in your DNA,” said UCLA’s Wayne Grody. “What’s predictive is having a sedentary lifestyle and eating a lot of high-fat, high-carbohydrate foods.” (Approx. 1:24s mark – video download)

“Understanding common genomic traits across cancer types is critically important to the future of cancer diagnosis and treatment,” says Dr. Paul Boutros, senior investigator of the study and now at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We were initially motivated by the inability to differentiate between aggressive and non-aggressive prostate cancers, but our findings provide insights into how treatments might be developed for many tumor types.”